COOPER SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT EDITED DRAFT. John Hendron. Audiotape

COOPER SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT EDITED DRAFT John Hendron Audiotape [This is an interview with John Hendron on June 3, 2003. The interviewer is Judy Lyn Sweetland. The transcriber is Jolene Bernhard.] JS: Today is June 3, 2003. This is the Oral History Project for the old Cooper School. The narrator is... Jonathan, your name and spell it. JH: John A. Hendron. [spells last name] JS: The interviewer is Judy Lyn Sweetland. The last name is S-W-E-E-T-L-A-N-D. We re going to talk about memories of the old Cooper School. Now, it wasn t Cooper when you went there it was Youngstown. JH: Youngstown. I went there for eight years and it was still Youngstown when I graduated. JS: Eight years. Which years? JH: I came there in 1925 and graduated in February of 1934. JS: Nineteen twenty-five to 1934? JH: Yes. JS: And it was still Youngstown? JH: Yes. JS: What was the neighborhood like when you lived there? JH: I think it was regarded as a poorer neighborhood. Not too prosperous. And there were a number of people from other countries. For example, within three blocks of where I lived, there were nine Olson families. Within a three-block radius of my house. There were a lot of Italians. And there were Greek, Yugoslavian. Quite a number of immigrant families. 1

JS: Do you remember what street you lived on? JH: Twenty-one Oh Six West Genesee. Two blocks up the hill, above the school. Directly above the north end. JS: So it was easy for you to walk. JH: Oh, yes. I could go home for lunch quite readily which, during the Depression, we did very often. As a matter of fact, it was a little rare to be able to eat in the school cafeteria. After all, it did cost twelve, maybe fifteen cents. [ironically] JS: That was a lot of money then. JH: Yes, it was. JS: Did many students eat at school? JH: Yes, the lunchroom was always full. JS: Some students probably took their lunches. JH: Oh, most kids took their lunches, yes. JS: How long did you have for lunch, do you remember? JH: One hour. JS: A whole hour. JH: Between twelve and one. JS: Do you know how it was that your family came to move there? JH: Yes. We lived in Granite Falls, where I was born. And my dad worked at the Waite Mill up there. He was second engineer, and his uncle was chief engineer. When the mill shut down, Dad came to Nettleton Mill, which was about a mile north of the steel mill. I believe Lockheed built a shipyard there later. That was the largest saw mill in Seattle at that time. Dad was engineer there, ran the power house. JS: Was that on what s Harbor Island now? JH: No. It s due north of the steel mill. JS: Like on the road going out to Alki? Cause the steel mill s 2

JH: Yes, yes. There are some older houses down there where Japanese people lived. There were about three families of Japanese the Ishidas, for example. Akiko Ishida was in my class. And her little brother Tomio was in another class. JS: Say those names again? JH: Akiko Ishida. JH: And her brother was Tomio. Smart kids. Very nice kids. And they were the only Orientals in our school. We didn t have any black students at that time. We did temporarily have one little black boy but he was only there a matter of weeks. Then he moved somewhere else. JS: What was the name of the first mill your father worked in? JH: Waite Lumber Mill at Granite Falls. JS: At Granite Falls, OK. So Nettleton was the saw mill here? I didn t know there were any saw mills. JH: Yes. It was the biggest saw mill in Seattle. JS: Really? JH: Oh, yes. And just north of Pigeon Hill, there was another lumber mill. West something Lumber Mill. There was another one at Spokane Street and Alaskan Way, where they made plywood. JS: Three saw mills, wow. JH: And the steel mill. JS: And the steel mill. JH: That s what Seattle was built from. The efforts that went on in that valley. JS: What was it like for you as a young child, living there? JH: When I look back, I consider myself very fortunate. We were on the edge of the woods. For example, the people just to the east of us had a large pasture that s now sort of a park around the new school. At the top of the hill. That land, over to where I lived at Twenty-First and Genessee, that was all pasture. We used to catch frogs down there, and pollywogs, etcetera. Picked blackberries. And when we d really get adventurous, we d go on further south and into the canyon. The canyon was really isolated. I never saw a grown-up in that canyon but I saw a number of kids making sure that the trilliums were wiped out every year. JS: The trilliums? 3

JH: Yes. We d go out and pick trilliums. The best I ever did was eighty-five, which I brought home to my mother and she would fill a bowl with them. Now I feel so ashamed of myself for having wiped out the trilliums. JS: [chuckling] Didn t they grow back the next year? JH: I don t know whether they did or not, really. I was told later that they did not. I hope that s wrong. JS: Was that going down to West Marginal Way, then? That canyon? JH: It does end up at West Marginal Way. There is a road that goes up there now, starting at the end of the canyon. But the canyon is still very much as it was, say eighty years ago. JS: That s where the blue herons are, probably? JH: I didn t know there were blue herons. JS: There are blue herons and there s been an effort to get a, you know, a preserve designation there because there ve been efforts for a number of years to do a development. JH: Good! I m certainly glad to hear that. JS: And there s been efforts to restrict that and make that a... JH: Good. Glad to hear it. We had a heron preserve here in Magnolia that we cherish. JS: Well, it sounds like it s going to happen. Sounds like it s going to happen. JH: I hope that canyon stays the way it is. Beautiful piece of nature right in the city. JS: There s a lot of effort to preserve those open spaces there. So, did you ever play down along the river? JH: Um, usually only six days a week. In the summer. JS: Only six days a week in the summer? JH: On Sunday, I had to go to church. Had to go to Sunday School. Yes, we did play along the river. And I learned to swim in that river by taking a piece of rope and putting five ring corks fishnet corks on the rope, and tying it around my waist. That caused me to float. The rings were about, oh, six inches in diameter. Two or three inches thick. After awhile, I was able to take one ring off... and I could still swim. And then I d take another ring, until I had only three rings on my life belt. I was still able to swim alright. 4

I was going to take off another one, then I thought, What the heck! I think I can swim without it. Then I threw it away. JS: And never used it again? JH: Never used it again. JS: That was pretty creative. Creative and courageous! JH: I had instructors. JS: You had instructors. JH: Older fellows... JS: They were kind of watching you? JH: Yeah, we had... it was almost like a club. Maybe up to two dozen kids, build a fire every afternoon. So, in spite of the weather, we d be swimming down at the Duwamish. The place where we were at the end of the dock there, let s see, Virgil Mackey lived there with his dad. They had a section of beach, they didn t mind if we played on it they were very good to us but they were the only residence in that area. There were several businesses, factories between there and West Marginal Way. And boats would come in and tie up at that dock occasionally. Like the old Mohawk, which was similar to, say the Virginia V, which is still going. The Seattle Steamer Fleet. JS: Seattle Steamer Fleet? JH: We had a steamboat service, you might say, up and down Puget Sound at that time. Sometimes we d get on a boat that was tied up at the dock and hide until it backed down into the river. Then we d get up and thumb our noses at the captain, and jump off the bow as they backed out. JS: And swim to shore? JH: Yeah. JS: That sounds like quite an adventure. JH: It was, especially the time I dove off a ship that s moving a little too fast, almost dislocated my shoulder. I wasn t able to use that arm swimming in. I had to go under the dock. JS: What did you hit? Did you hit the boat itself? JH: No, I just hit the water. 5

JS: Wrong. JH: Well, I was going down steeply from the bow of this ship, and it was moving so fast that when I hit the water, the force of the water... just like hitting a river, a swift river. JS: And I bet your parents never knew you were doing that, right? JH: Absolutely not! [emphatically] Except, I did have a little brother, eight years younger than I, who came with me one time. Told my mother we were going fishing. We got on a float that was there. We went under a dock, the dock was the center of that area. We got under there and Jimmy pushed against the piling... and splat! Went right in the water. The float moved away, turned into a raft. JS: Did he know how to swim? JH: No, he did not. He had never been swimming. When we got home, my mother saw how wet he was. I caught what might be described as hell! Still smarts. JS: How d you get him out of the water? How d he get out? JH: Oh, I was able to grab him. He just fell in the water. I was still on the raft. I pulled him on it, tried to build a fire and dried him out. There was nobody else swimming that day. I guess it was a weekend after school had started. So, I was alone down there with my little brother. But was I killed? Hell, no! You should see me now. JS: Well, I ve heard some other stories about playing along the river and it sounds like a wonderful place for children to grow up. It s kind of sad to drive along there with all the industry but they ve made some public access areas now that are really quite nice. Have you been down there recently? JH: No. Though I ve seen them. JS: Yeah, there s parking and, you know, they ve cleaned them up and planted some nice plantings. JH: By Kellogg Island? JS: One of them is right across from Kellogg Island and then one is a little bit further north. JH: Kellogg Island at that time was just a mud flat. When the tide was high, it would completely cover the island. There were cattails and that s everything growing on it. I recall in the 1970s, there was a bit of an uproar about the city using the island for something else. And people were saying, oh, that was an Indian village or something. Nonsense! It was a mud flat that got covered totally with water. The Indians weren t that stupid! 6

JS: [pulling out pictures] OK, I m going to go to the school now and I m going to show you... This picture was taken in 1917. That s probably the way the school looked when you went there. JH: Exactly. Exactly. I lived up here. JS: So, you lived up on top of the hill? JH: Over here is the steps that go up the hill. We lived at the top of the steps. JS: The steps were there then? JH: Yes. They were wooden. It was cleared and planked. JS: That s the way you went to school over down those wooden steps. JH: Oh, I d love to have a copy of this. JS: I can make a copy of it for you. I don t have dates of when those others [were taken]. That s the north play field. I don t know if that looks anything at all like it did when you were there. JH: Nope. Up here is Twenty-Third Avenue. Across the other side of the fence, where the steps go up, the first house there had a candy store in its basement. And if you could get three or four cents together, that s where we d go. JS: They had a candy store in their basement? JH: Yep. Mr. and Mrs. Balls. JS: Balls? B-A-L-L-S? JH: Yes. JS: What did you do during recess at school? You probably didn t go out to get candy during recess, did you? Could you leave the playground during recess? JH: No, we didn t have time. I can remember running and sliding on the ice. That was a favorite thing to do. JS: It got icy? JH: Oh, yes. It was pretty wet along the hill there, behind the school building. JS: Was it all dirt? JH: There were four portable buildings. Wooden buildings. 7

JS: Here s another picture. We don t know when [it was taken] but it looks like portable buildings. JH: This was after it was rebuilt. After they added the south half of the building. This half is what we saw in the first picture. Then they added this about 1928 or in there. But there were four portable buildings back here. JS: Oh, in the back of the school. JH: They had, let s see, second grade there. And I had the third grade in this old building. Fourth grade I was back in the portable here again. JS: Let me just review that connection to the pictures here. In the 1917 picture, you had second grade in this building to the north of the school? JH: Third grade. JS: Third grade in that building to the north of the school. JH: Mrs. Williams. JS: Mrs. Williams, OK. Were there several classes in that building? JH: Oh, yes. Yes. It was a two-story building. My class was in this corner on the first floor. JS: Would be the southwest corner. JH: Yes. JS: Then in this picture we don t know the date you can see the building in the back of the school. And that s where you lived? JH: Up on the hill behind the school. JH: This is the covered area of the new building. JS: I don t want you to cover the microphone there. JH: This is the covered play area back here. That area of the school, back in here, is where those four portable buildings were and each one was heated with a coal stove. On a cold day sometimes, we d get that stove totally hot. It would get red hot. Enough that when I think about it now, it scares me. If a kid had ever fallen against that, it would have burned right through his skin. JS: Wow. So, was the play area covered like that when you were there? 8

JH: No, that was covered when they built this new part of the building. JS: With the gymnasium and the auditorium. JH: Yes. JS: What kinds of things did you do at recess? JH: I told you about the ice skating. Sliding. We would occasionally play dodge ball. It was usually a matter of playing catch with a softball. Or playing tag. We frequently had sort of a semi-organized game. Tag or dodge ball, that kind of thing. Mr. [Aaron] Newell, the first principal when I was there in 1925, he tried to get us to play Blind Man s Bluff. I don t think we ever did get very good at it. I ve got to tell you about Mr. Newell. JS: Is that K-N-O-L-L? JH: I don t know. I have a little trouble with my memory on this subject because we re talking about almost eighty years ago. Seventy-six years. He was in his eighties then, as I am now. But he was principal of that school. My first experience that I can recall with him was that I came out of the boys room, pushed the door open it was a swinging door when I got outside, I was leaning against the door and holding it shut, so my friends on the inside couldn t get out. They were banging on the door and hollering. I was on an angle, so I had it pretty well stopped up. Had my legs kind of apart, really pushing on that door. All of a sudden I went up that door three or four feet. I had been swatted on the bottom by Mr. Knoll. He came up behind me and just lifted me right off the ground with that swat. I want you to know that he as a boy had shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln. So, this bottom has been swatted by a hand that shook the hand of Abraham Lincoln! [proudly] JS: [chuckling] That s quite a testament. That was the common way of discipline, was a swat on the bottom? JH: Yes. Miss Perry, Bella Perry, who followed him as principal, she came about 1926 or 7. She used a leather strap. Fortunately, I never had that strap used on me. On a couple of occasions, she did get me to come into the office for a talking to because I had done something that I wasn t supposed to do. I can t remember now what it was. But she never did use the strap on me. There were two or three fellows that were quite a bit older they had flunked a class and had to take it over again. And here they were still in school, grade school, at age fifteen, sixteen. One kid was, I believe, seventeen and still at grade school. JS: So, she used the leather strap on them? JH: Yes. Big leather strap, reminiscent of a razor strap. JS: Do you think any of the girls ever had that used on them? 9

JH: I never heard of a girl being, uh... paddled with a strap. JS: When you were going to school there, were the girls and the boys separated on the playground? JH: Yes. Girls on one end, boys on the other end. JS: I ve got a picture of the boys bathroom here. Is that what it looked like when you went there? JH: That s right. JS: It is? That s where you locked your friends in, huh? JH: Yeah. The door was over here. I was leaning against the door. JS: This is a picture of the main office from the hallway. That s the way it looks like now. JH: Sure didn t look like that then. JS: It didn t look like that then, OK. JH: That was a very important place with Miss Perry on the throne. JS: Let me just hold it out here so it won t cover the mike. OK, so that looks different JH: Well, now it s being used as a storeroom apparently. It was always a very neat, businesslike place. Miss Perry was a dignified lady from the South, I think some place like Augusta or Atlanta. Georgia. Some place like that. She had a bit of an accent, but was a very cultured lady. Always drove an impressive car. JS: Oh, did she? [surprised] JH: Yes. JS: She earned enough money to have a nice car? JH: Yes. JS: [picking up another picture] Here s the hallway on the second floor. The way it looks now. JH: We didn t have lockers when I was there. JS: At all? JH: No. 10

JS: Not any place in the school? JH: Not until I got to high school. I thought that was really coming up in the world when I had my own locker. JS: Those went in sometime in the late 1990s, I guess, because I interviewed somebody else who went to school... I mean the late 1930s. In the late thirties, she remembers those the older grades. The younger grades didn t have them but the older grades did. Here s a classroom on the first floor. I m sure that looks very different from when you were there. JH: It certainly does. I recognize the blackboards and their positions. The windows would be over here, right? JS: Um-hmm. Um-hmm. JH: I remember when they put in the floor there. It was kept very shiny and clean. JS: Wooden? Was it wooden? JH: Nope. This was on the first floor. And if we marked that floor with our heels, say the black rubber of your shoe left a mark on the floor, you re in trouble. JS: Did you have to clean it up yourself? JH: Oh, yes. You bet. [emphatically] You d go get a paper towel, and some soap and water and scrub. JS: Scrub it clean. So, they kept the school really clean? JH: They did. Mr. Ross, the custodian, was a very, very precise man about his job. He did everything very thoroughly. JS: Here s what was the library on the third floor. Did you have a library? JH: Yes. Not like this though. This was the reading room, you might say. Miss [Florine] Bassett taught the class. On this end was a smaller room that had the books in it. The encyclopedias and that sort of thing. The reference room it s called. And this would have been the classroom and the desks. JS: You had classes in the library? JH: If they call it library now we didn t call it library then. It was just reading room, adjacent to this room. JS: The reference room. 11

JH: The reference room, yes. JS: OK. Were the auditorium and gymnasium built when you were going? JH: Yes. They were added about [19]27 or [19]28. [The extension was added in 1929.] JS: Well, these are really a mess! These pictures of the gym and the cafeteria. Does any of that look familiar? JH: Yeah, up here would be the hill, right? The woods. JS: Yes. Right. Out those windows. JH: Auditorium and cafeteria? JS: I think that must be looking at the end towards where the food would have been served. JH: Now this was the stage. We didn t eat in the auditorium when I was there. Not before 1934. JS: Where did you eat? JH: The lunchroom was on the north end. Where s that JS: That picture? JH: It s in here, in this part of the building. JS: That s the northwest corner of the building. JH: Yes, the older part of the building. JS: On the first floor? On the first floor? JH: Yes. JS: OK, so the northwest corner on the first floor before 1934. That s where the lunchroom was. JH: Right here as where I recall it. JS: OK, that s interesting. JH: I say 1934 because that s the year I left there and went to West Seattle High School. 12

JS: Ah. Well, this [picture] is called the play shed on the north side. So, that would be under that covered area? JH: Yes. This was great because we could still play when it was raining. Which happens occasionally... JH: Four times rebuilt. JS: You ve seen it rebuilt four times? JH: I was in this old building that was here. That was there before this was. This is the way it was when I came. They rebuilt the school and added on to this building about 1927, 28, along in there. I remember that as the second school following this. Then they built the Cooper School to the south of this, on Delridge there, to replace these. Now, they ve built the school on the top of the hill. That s four times I ve seen a school built. And it makes me think of when I worked in England, 1956 to 59. I was with Exxon. I had some friends from the University of Washington who were on the faculty at Oxford. And I d go up to Oxford occasionally. See those old buildings? The oldest of which I recall was built in 1300. Now, what kind of an education could you get in a building that old? We would build probably four hundred buildings in that time, here. JS: What do you think about that? JH: I think that our tax money is abused. JS: Now I want to clarify for the tape here the picture that was taken in 1917, you re saying the building to the left, which would be to the north of the school, was the first building that was there. JH: Yes, a wooden building. JS: A wooden building. Do you remember when that one was taken down? JH: Yes. When they built this part of the school. JS: Oh, OK. The addition. JH: They added on to the south end of the big brick building. JS: Then they tore down that wooden one? JH: See, this is all part of the playground. And here are houses and trees. There used to be a road going back here, and a farmer lived maybe half a mile into the woods, up toward where the golf course is now. JS: That was all woods? 13

JH: All solid woods all the way through. And this farmer would come out of there with a horse and wagon, even in the late 1920s. JS: Did he sell his produce? JH: I don t know what he raised. He had cows, probably milk. A lot of people in those days did have cows and would sell the milk locally. JS: Chickens? The eggs? JH: Chickens, yeah. We d buy our eggs from neighbors. JS: Did you have a favorite teacher? JH: I think I loved them all. I can t think of a one I did not like. JS: Were you a good student? JH: My mother was on the campus at UW in 1947. And Miss Jessie Williams, my third grade teacher, was there at the same time she was. They got together and this woman told my mother that I had had the highest IQ of any kid that had ever gone to that school. I don t think that s too remarkable because I went out there to the new building for Cooper School, south of this one, went out there and asked if I could look at my records since stuff was archived at the time. My IQ in one test I found there was 131. And that s not too remarkable. I beat that when I went into the Army had 143. But those teachers did a great job for me. They gave me a good start in life. As a matter of fact, I still get called as a consultant for the Polaris Missile program. We re using the old Polaris s as targets for the anti missile program down in [Serpic?]. They fire the Polaris from Kodiak down toward Qualralene, in that area. I d choose them and each one was successful. Each of those motors I had selected before they were fired. I wrote the NASA quality inspection book for those missiles, when it was started in 1960. JS: Who were you working for? JH: Aerojet at Sacramento, California. I have a reason for telling you this. Those teachers gave me the ability to be useful at age eighty-three. When I think about them now, there s nothing but love and respect in my heart for every teacher I had. There was no teacher that I would complain about for not having done a good job at Youngstown School. I mean that sincerely. JS: I believe you. [softly] JH: The teachers at Youngstown were selected as good teachers. That school was regarded in other places in the city as underprivileged. And I think they made a special effort to make it a fine school. They gave us excellent teachers to carry that out. So, I was lucky living in Youngstown. 14

JS: People are very proud of that community, people who lived and grew up there. I think you would find that the same thing is true now. JS: Let s see. Wow! Nothing bad about the teachers. That s pretty amazing. JH: I can t think of anything detrimental about any one of them. JS: Were there any other schools in the area that you had rivalry with? JH: No, we didn t have inter-school athletics at that time. We could play softball and we could play soccer. We did not have any basketball. No football. We didn t compete with other schools, as the high schools did. JS: Did you celebrate the holidays at school? JH: Such as Christmas? JS: Or Valentine s Day. Or President s Day. JH: Oh, yes. Valentine s Day, we d exchange a lot of valentines, of course. President s Day was just another holiday. We were very grateful to President Lincoln for having been born on February 12. That gave us a holiday. And then we were grateful that George Washington gave us another holiday ten days later. JS: You got a holiday for each one of them? JH: Yes. Now that s something to appreciate! [chuckling] Day off from school. JS: And were there any celebrations about Christmas? JH: We d have a Christmas tree in the school. One Christmas tree. That s all I can think of. Oh, and we did have a good Glee Club. Jennie Jones, background was Wales her family came from Wales. She was a wonderful teacher when it came to singing. We had what we called the Glee Club. It was voluntary but most of the older kids were in that Glee Club. I can remember going to the Civic Auditorium with them to sing Christmas carols. And I can recall going to the Olympic Hotel on another occasion for a recital that we did with our Glee Club. JS: Do you remember what grades you were in when you were in the Glee Club? JH: Sixth, seventh, eighth. We did have programs at school, as well. Christmas pageants. The Glee Club would sing the carols. JS: Can you remember any other programs you had or any special events that occurred? Anybody special coming to the school or anything? 15

JH: One very notable person that stands out in my memory was Mr. Lemmel, the boys advisor at West Seattle High School. For some reason, I thought he was the next thing to God. JS: What was his name again? JH: Lemmel. JS: Lennel. JH: L-E-M - M -E-L. JS: Len-nel, OK. From the high school. JH: Yes. He had three or four kids himself going through the school. He was a very fine advisor to kids who had problems. JS: Oh. Well, is there anything else that you d like to say about the school when you were there? Or the neighborhood? JH: There were times when I thought it would be nice is we lived somewhere where the neighborhood had more respect. But now that I look back on it, I find that I was very lucky. One of my classmates, Plato Kourkoumellis, was telling me about his brother Jim, who was ahead of me a grade. When he died, he left $30 million to the family. And my buddy all the way through school Herbert Dettmer turned out to be a colonel in the army, and was in the nuclear weapons program at Albuquerque. Los Alamos, that area. Arian Corliss, another buddy of mine, he had a company that he started at 6th Avenue South, sold some kind of business supplies. Can t remember exactly what it was. What I m getting at is the fellows I knew at school all did well. I didn t know of any that failed. Ted Canlis became a banker, I mean a bank executive. So, I feel very fortunate at having gone there, although there were times when I thought maybe things could have been better. JS: Better at the school? JH: The neighborhood. JS: You felt a difference being in that neighborhood? JH: Yes. When we d drive up into West Seattle, the finer houses... The streets were paved. We had gravel streets. I remember when the streets were graded. A man walked behind the scoop with two handles on it, behind the horse pulling the scoop. The man would control the handles, scoop up the dirt, move it over to grade the streets. Then they put in sewers. The entire area up there was stump land when we moved there. JS: Stumps? JH: Yes. You see it as woods now. Just stumps with blackbirds [then]. 16

JS: So, when you went to high school, did you stay together with your friends from Youngstown School? Or did you make new friends? JH: A guy walked to school with him, had to walk from Twenty-First and Genesee to the high schools JS: A long walk. JH: About two miles. The only time I recall being put out about it, I was sick at school, got up to a pretty high fever. They sent me home, I had to walk two miles with rain falling all the time! Looking back now, everything that happened was for the good because I m still looking forward in life, not backward. JS: And you feel like your schooling was helpful for that? JH: It certainly was. Yes, there were excellent teachers that I had. A real blessing. JS: Well, I think that s a good place to end the interview on. That s quite a positive statement. Thank you, John. JH: Thank you. END OF INTERVIEW OF JOHN HENDRON ON JUNE 3, 2003 17